Consider once more the heinous nature of News International's eavesdroppers: intercepting the voicemail messages of murder victim Milly Dowler; hacking into the phones of the parents of one of the Soham murder victims; listening in to the mobile phones of the families of 7/7 victims and of servicemen killed in Afghanistan.

No one was safe from the journalists and investigators of Wapping. Not even the country's prime minister.

Brown has now revealed that his infant son's medical records were obtained by the Sun. And the paper went on to publish a story about the child's serious illness.

Brown's tax affairs were the subject of computer hacking. Lawyers were fooled into handing over details from the files.

The sheer scale of the assault on Brown's privacy is mind-boggling.

There are all sorts of related questions too, about failures of security - and, once more, about Scotland Yard's failings.

Scandal follows scandal. There are no words to describe just how big it is, with political, policing and media involvement.

Is our current prime minister, David Cameron, able to cope? I don't think so, because he is compromised too. But he had better act correctly from now on or the country will make him pay.

As for Murdoch, he is in a firestorm, caught in the kind of media feeding frenzy that his own papers have so often orchestrated. It is difficult not to delight in his embarrassment.

I think Murdoch himself is incapable of experiencing embarrassment, as the spectacle of him grinning with his arm slung around Rebekah Brooks shows (his moral blindspot makes for a total eclipse), but his children--his heirs--must be looking on in horror.